Pandit
Uday Shankar was born on December 8, 1900 and became a world-renowned classical
dancer and choreographer in India. Vishnudharmottarapurana mentions Vina tu
nrtta sastrena chitrasutram sudurvidam- without the knowledge of dance the art
of painting is an unattainable ideal. Uday Shankar obviously was well
acquainted with this inter-relationship and inter-dependence of arts
instinctively. In 1923, when the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, asked him to
fashion dance with Indian themes, he choreographed Krishna and Radha possibly
in an imaginative manner. He aligned Anna Pavlova, the greatest ballerina of
the world, and started his grand sojourn of dance, looking back was not
destined and rising the ladder of fame was a self willed affair. From painting to
dancing he made a smooth transition. It was his graceful grandeur that made
Indian a world event in the domain of dance. Liberating himself from imitative
culture he transgressed the known world of cultural dance laying emphasis on
seeking the essence of the cultural legacy giving it a distinct Indian
identity.
Udaipur,
a colorful town in Rajasthan happens to the hometown of an aristocratic Bengali
family, where Pandit Uday Shankar was born. The ancestors of Pandit Uday
Shankar belonged to Narail (in modern-day Bangladesh). Pandit Uday Shankar
acquired the formal training in the art in Bombay, while he studied at the
Royal College of Art in London. From his very adolescence he was conspicuously
interested in magic, handling camera music stage performance of various sorts.
Uday Shankar's father made himself comfortable as his mentor and advisor; he
inhabited a world of Sanskrit scholarship and Indian princely states. Uday
Shankar, a Bengali Brahmin,
was raised in a village near Varanasi and in
the princely state of Jhalawar, where his father held a series of official
posts in this small Rajasthani kingdom. His education continued in Mumbai and in London, where he went to join
his father in 1920. So when he sailed back to India at age of 30, after ten
consecutive years in Europe and America, he had to rediscover his land. After a
year he left India again, taking his family to Paris, the base for his first
dance company of Indian artists, co-founded with Swiss sculptress Alice Boner.
The
creative heads noticed Pandit Uday Shankar when he created wonderful ballets
based on Hindu themes like Radha-Krishna, Hindu weddings and other oriental
themes for Anna. He loved to fuse the dance forms and make a blend of Eastern
and Western. During the 1930s, Uday travelled across the western world along
with his own troupe. His version of western theatrical techniques to Indian
dance made his art massively popular both in India and the West. His brother Ravi Shankar helped him to popularize Indian
classical music in the
West. To know more read:
